Actor Richard Dreyfuss recently appeared on Firing Line with Margaret Hoover where he mostly talked about his efforts to bring back civics education. Near the end of the interview, Hoover asked him how he felt about new rules instituted by the Oscars that require nominees for Best Picture to meet certain representation and inclusion standards. If you haven’t heard about these rules here’s a sample from the Oscars website:

For the 96th Oscars (Award Show 2024), submitting a confidential Academy Inclusion Standards form (RAISE) and meeting TWO out of FOUR of the following standards will be required in order for the film to be deemed eligible:

STANDARD A:  ON-SCREEN REPRESENTATION, THEMES AND NARRATIVES

A film can achieve this standard by meeting the criteria in at least ONE of the following areas:

A1. Lead or significant supporting actors from underrepresented racial or ethnic groups

At least one of the lead actors or significant supporting actors is from an underrepresented racial or ethnic group in a specific country or territory of production.

This may include:
• African American / Black / African and/or Caribbean descent
• East Asian (including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Mongolian)
• Hispanic or Latina/e/o/x
• Indigenous Peoples (including Native American / Alaskan Native)
• Middle Eastern / North African
• Pacific Islander
• South Asian (including Bangladeshi, Bhutanese, Indian, Nepali, Pakistani, and Sri Lankan)
• Southeast Asian (including Burmese, Cambodian, Filipino, Hmong, Indonesian, Laotian, Malaysian, Mien, Singaporean, Thai, and Vietnamese)

That’s just part of one of the four standards. In order to be eligible for Best Picture each film has to meet at least two of the four. But Dreyfuss is not a fan of the new standards. In fact he said they made him want to “vomit.”

When Hoover asked him why, the actor said, “Because this is an art form.”

“It’s also a form of commerce and it makes money,” the actor said. “But it’s an art. And no one should be telling me as an artist that I have to give into the latest, most current idea of what morality is.”…

“I don’t think that there is a minority or a majority in this country that has to be catered to like that,” Dreyfuss went on to say during the interview.

He then cited a bit of a history regarding Laurence Olivier being “the last white actor to play Othello,” referring to the 1965 film, in which the British actor performed in blackface

Dreyfuss praised the performance, saying Olivier played the role “brilliantly.”

Dreyfuss suggested it was wrong to tell a white actor he couldn’t play Othello or a non-Jewish actor that he couldn’t play the Merchant of Venice. All of which makes sense to me. If acting is the skill of make-believe for an audience then why shouldn’t a skilled actor be able to play someone who doesn’t look like them. Or why can’t a cast be all male or all female or all black, as was the case with the hit musical Hamilton.

But of course we’ve already seen people lose roles over controversies like this. Back in 2018 actress Scarlett Johannsson pulled out of a film in which she was set to play a trans person after a backlash. In that case she initially fought back saying, “Tell them that they can be directed to Jeffrey Tambor, Jared Leto, and Felicity Huffman’s reps for comment.” But she later caved and offered an apology. “Our cultural understanding of transgender people continues to advance, and I’ve learned a lot from the community since making my first statement about my casting and realize it was insensitive,” she told Out Magazine.

Something similar happened in 2020 when Halle Berry let it slip that she was considering doing a film in which she would play a trans man. There was a backlash and soon afterwards Berry apologized.

The new rules are just one more instance of the push for equity. The goal now is to mandate the proper outcomes and punish those who fail to meet them. In this case, no one in Hollywood wants to risk losing out on a Best Picture nomination so they’ll all comply with the new rules which, as Dreyfuss correctly points out, are part of the new morality.